East End Review

Blog

  • Shoreditch Town Hall exhibition tells stories of migration through art

    sfasfsfafs
    Thumbs up: photograph taken from My Journey exhibition

    According to the 2011 census, nearly two million of London’s residents were born outside the UK.

    The figure for Hackney was 35 per cent, or nearly 70,000 people. All of their stories are different, with migrants coming to work, study, or to find a new life; others are fleeing for their lives, and many arrive in this country through desperate and difficult means.

    The Sudanese journalist, photographer and artist Anwar Elsamani, a migrant himself, is concerned with this last group. In particular, with the thousands of African migrants who have drowned in the last decade trying to cross the Mediterranean.

    In his contribution to a new art project My Journey, which encouraged recent migrants to tell their personal stories, Elsamani decided instead to look at this wider state of affairs.

    “I thought it was a good idea to talk about a big issue, not about my own journey,” he says. “Because my journey was not dangerous, like the
    other people’s.”

    The result is Lighting Your Way, a photo-film pleading to citizens of wealthy countries to stop cursing immigrants and instead try to put themselves in the shoes, for example, of passengers on the many boats which leave North Africa in secret and which never arrive in Southern Europe, whose passengers die in unknown circumstances thousands of miles from home.

    “I worked hard to be their voice,” Elsamani says. “The voice of the people who died before they touched Italy or Europe.”

    Elsamani’s own migration may not have been so risky, but he hardly had an easy time.

    In 2013 he was flown to the UK for medical treatment by the international organisation Freedom from Torture, and has been treated by their medical foundation in London since he arrived.

    Elsamani is a victim of torture by the Sudanese government, and was granted asylum in Britain last year. His work on the art project was an opportunity to “create something positive”, he says.

    Participants on the scheme, run by the Migrants Resource Centre (MRC), were given free courses in photography, film, comic strips and audio, but Elsamani’s work is informed by already- considerable experience in his field.

    Working as a journalist in Sudan, Elsamani had risen to second-in- command at a national daily before being forced to leave the country. He started journalism early on, writing his first news articles aged seven. Growing up in Zalinje, a town in Darfur, his father and uncles would bring him English-language newspapers and get him to read them aloud. He turned a small profit in the process.

    “After I had finished, they gave me some coins, so every day I got a lot of money, for me as a child,” he says.Photography was another early interest. One of his uncles agreed to go halves on a Polaroid camera if Elsamani could save up enough money. His early photos were of “a wall, the floor; there was no one to show me how to do it,” he says.

    Nonetheless, Elsamani became a teenage roving reporter, calling himself ‘the mobile journalist’. After university in the capital Khartoum he went professional, eventually reporting from all over Sudan.

    Elsamani’s work paid particular attention to remote villages and the growing number of refugee camps, home to displaced people from Sudan’s own civil war and from conflicts in the surrounding region.

    “This kind of work, few other journalists focus on it, because they want to sit in a cool hall with the politicians. But for me, I don’t like that form of journalism because those people, they have a lot of chances to say what they like to say. What about the people without that chance?”

    His photo from one refugee camp, of two small girls craning to fill a plastic jug from a filthy trickle of water at the bottom of a sandy hole, won an award for promoting children’s rights from the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 2009. He won the prize again in 2010.

    Visiting the camps brought him into contact with many migrants’ experiences long before he was forced to live his own.

    “I knew how they continued their lives, what the problems were. Sometimes they spent three years, five years on the way. And in this journey, they lose their money, the girls are raped, some people in Egypt kill them – sometimes they took their eyes, harvested their organs.”

    When Elsamani arrived in the UK, the Home Office initially wanted to house him in Middlesbrough, but Freedom from Torture persuaded them he needed to remain in London to continue his medical treatment. He lived in Stratford for a few months until Newham Council, unable to house him, moved him to Hackney. He now lives in a hostel near the Town Hall with many other migrants from all over the world.

    From here, he writes articles for newspapers in the Middle East and Arabic-language papers in the UK.

    Hackney’s high rents and deposits make leaving the hostel difficult to imagine. Elsamani photographs prolifically. On a recent outing to Regents Canal’s houseboat regatta, he spent five hours photographing the reflections of houseboats in the water. “I went there like it was a date with my girlfriend,” he says of the day out with his camera.

    The resultant photos are beautiful semi-abstract interfolding blocks of colour, the scattered reflections of the painted sides of the houseboats filling the whole frame. The surface of the water appears to assume different textures depending on the angle of the light, taking on by turns a shiny metallic gleam or a matt surface like a tray of brightly coloured powder.

    Elsamani admires the Sudanese painter Ibrahim el-Salahi, who recently had a major retrospective at the Tate Modern and who is himself a refugee, who Elsamani believes “is feeling his way” – carrying on in the path he feels is right. “I feel that the colours and the light are the secret of life,” says Elsamani.

    The sheer number of migrants in London leads to a story told in statistics, but Elsamani aims to tell a different story: “There are a lot of people who lose their life because they change their job or what they like, because there is a problem here for them to continue their ways.

    “So just for one problem, they lose everything. And if they can have another chance, they can make a life for themselves.”

    My Journey is at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT until 10 October.

  • Lee Jackson: ‘The crux of modern life is Victorian’

    A meeting of 'smoke makers' in Dirty Old London
    A meeting of ‘smoke makers’ in Dirty Old London

    According to Stoke Newington writer and historian Lee Jackson, the funny thing about the smoke, fog and grime in Victorian London was how people seemed to love it.

    “There are so many quotes about ‘dear, dirty old London’,” Jackson says. “They’ve got that sort of indulgence for the filth and the grubbiness of it, because it’s so distinctive – distinctively urban.”

    Jackson has just spent two years researching such delights as cesspools in the 1860s, and has sifted through the account-books of rag-and-bone men to write the book which takes its title from such affectionate sentiments.

    Dirty Old London: the Victorian Fight Against Filth is the story of a forgotten world, a world in which it was normal for the streets to be two-foot-deep in mud, for hats to turn black simply from being worn outside and for tap-water to be deemed drinkable as long as the half-glass of brown sediment it contained had sunk to the bottom.

    One of the book’s achievements is to enable the imaginative leap required to understand that these conditions were once accepted as the status quo. His prose forms a well-sprung surface from which the reader can make this jump into the past, recording the development of everyday amenities like paved roads and the collection of rubbish which it is easy to forget are ideas someone once had to think up.

    It’s a gripping tale which pits diligent reformers and wacky idealists against the literally parochial governing authorities and the stubborn refusal of the middle classes ever to pay for any kind of civic improvement.

    “It’s that very sort of Victorian, 19th century, laissez-faire sort of thing; small government,” says Jackson. “And the whole book in a way is about that sort of thing: what does it mean to have local government?”

    Dirty Old London answers the question in such an intriguing way that you start to wonder why people don’t ask it more often. Household waste, for instance. At the start of the century, the collection of ‘dust’ – predominantly made up of ash from fireplaces – was a jealously guarded privilege awarded to private contractors, who paid local councils high fees to be allowed to collect it.

    Ash had value as it was used in the manufacture of bricks. There was a colossal demand for bricks at the time and, in consequence, for ash. Several ‘dust men’ became extraordinarily wealthy from the trade, including Henry Dodd, an Islington rubbish merchant who left an estate of £111,000 when he died in 1881 (a fortune that in today’s money would be comparable to that of J.K. Rowling).

    But the dust trade was a victim of its own success. London grew too big, and the ‘brickfields’ in which the East End was baked were moved further away from the centre of the city. It became less and less economical to cart dust out that far, and bricks imported from Birmingham offered too much competition.

    London was also ‘the Smoke’ – “a city named after its own pollutant”, as Jackson puts it. Fog was only part of the problem, but an all-enveloping part. It had a certain allure, and featured prominently in the erotic anecdotes assembled into the anonymous pornographic memoir My Secret Life, as well as in popular magazine stories about low-vis romantic encounters of the sort that – in Jackson’s words – “end with people turning round and saying ‘didn’t you know that was the Countess Von Such and Such you were speaking to!’”

    Mud was also pervasive. Most of it was horse-dung, mixed with general filth and sewage to form an omnipresent ooze. As with the brickfields, farmland became so far away as London developed that it was no longer worth anyone’s while to crape the mud off the streets and sell it for fertiliser – the system the city had relied on to keep its streets navigable.

    Crossing-sweepers – familiar to readers of Dickens as the ragged objects of benevolence, cruelty and non-standard orthography (such as Jo in Bleak House, whose every ‘v’ is written as a ‘w’) – didn’t simply keep junctions looking tidy as their name might suggest, but were actually in charge of ploughing a thoroughfare or ‘crossing’ through the mire and keeping it clean so that people could get from one side to the other, relying on optional tips as payment for the service.

    Jackson’s enthusiasm for this stuff stems from his days as a Victorian crime novelist. His research ran away with him and now he predominantly writes history. He is the man behind the online archive of historical documents Victorian London, a website so popular that it’s listed first on a Google search for its name, beating Wikipedia and the several museums and tour operators also competing for the term. “More people have read that website than have read my books, I’m sure of that,” he reflects.

    Jackson works on the period because of its continuing relevance. “It’s the cusp of modernity,” he says. “Transport. The Victorians thought you could annihilate time and space with the railway – you can suddenly move from one city to another in a couple of hours, the real modern transition.

    “The Victorians invented rollerskates, you have these wonderful photos of women in their bustles rollerskating around on rinks made of marble.”

    The washing machine, of the handle- operated kind, was also a 19th century invention, marketed using what Jackson calls “these amazing 1950s-style adverts. One was like ‘my servants wash more in three days than they used to in three weeks’, or ‘the boys in the reformatory now do their laundry much better than they could before!’

    “By the end of the era you have the cinema, the radio – it’s all there. There’s very little in modern life whose origins aren’t Victorian. The crux of modern life is Victorian, for me.”

    Jackson was born in Manchester and has lived in Stoke Newington for the last twenty years, an area which he says “started off as a very pretty village, and its first boom was as a rural retreat for bankers from the city.

    “Then people realised they could make a lot more money by buying the fields, digging up the clay and building houses.”

    He sees the social changes in Stoke Newington over the time he has lived there as “an exact parallel with Islington in the 1980s”, with gentrification and rising house prices. “I find it a bit depressing in a way how you just see wealth knocking people out of the way – and I’m part of it.

    “But no one owns any district for a long time in London – with the possible exception of Mayfair, which is literally owned by the Grosvenor estate. The beauty of things like Hackney and Islington is there aren’t these overweening vast estates. This has changed over time, and if there is an economic collapse it’ll all change again.”

    At a time when the idea of collective projects for the common good has once again become unpopular, it’s good to be reminded that it was only recently we managed to climb out of our own filth.

    Dirty Old London:The Victorian Fight Against Filth is published by Yale University Press. RRP: £20. ISBN 9780300192056

  • Shakespeare in Shoreditch festival launches

    Shakespeare mash up: Titus Andronicus
    Shakespeare mash up: Nic Lamont in The Best Pies in London

    Writing out of a purpose built shed outside the Rose Lipman Building in De Beauvoir Town, playwright Annie Jenkins has been challenged to write 1000 plays in just ten days.

    As part of the Shakespeare in Shoreditch festival, Jenkins will be welcoming people to drop by and share their stories and ideas, which she will turn into new dramatic works at a prolific rate.

    Originally from Seven Sisters, Jenkins is more than a little daunted by the task ahead. “It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” she confesses. “But that environment comes very naturally to me.”

    Jenkins’ shed is just one of the attractions that comprise Shakespeare in Shoreditch, celebrating East London’s part in the life of the world’s greatest playwright on his 450th birthday.

    Festival producer Francesca Duncan argues that “the South Bank has the Globe, and Stratford-upon-Avon has the RSC, so what about Shoreditch?”

    Thanks to recent archaeological discoveries, Shoreditch is now regarded as London’s first theatreland, a place where actors, poets and playwrights lived and worked during the golden age of poetry.

    Playwrights Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd roomed together just off Bishopsgate, Ben Jonson fought a duel killing a fellow actor in Hoxton Fields and Shakespeare premiered some of his best loved works including Romeo and Juliet at the Curtain theatre, commemorated on Hewett Street.

    The festival aims to re-connect Shakespeare’s vibrant Renaissance London with the contemporary area through promenade performances of newly commissioned work, playwriting workshops and salons with Shakespearean scholars.

    Felix Mortimer and Joshua Nawras, the festival’s creators, drew their inspiration from the Bard’s character names which adorn streets and tower blocks around Hoxton. Regan Way, Caliban Tower and Rosalind House are now the starting point for a new crop of writers, commissioned to reinterpret those same characters.

    Ten new plays, including a new piece by Rebecca Lenkiewicz whose play The Painter marked the opening of the Arcola’s new premises, will be presented in venues dotted along routes through Hoxton and Shoreditch.

    In preparation for her Titus Andronicus-inspired monologue, actor Nic Lamont even worked a shift at F. Cooke’s pie and mash shop on Hoxton Street, where The Best Pies in London will be performed.

    Jenkins says the wonderful thing about Shakespeare’s work is that it can be re-interpreted and re-imagined and still have relevance for a contemporary audience, and that “the plays are so universally applicable that everyone can engage with them”. Which is just what the festival sets out to prove to new audiences in Shakespeare’s old stomping ground.

    Shakespeare in Shoreditch Festival is at venues across Shoreditch until 12 October. See website for more details.

     

     

  • Alecky Blythe: ‘I don’t think theatre can change things greatly’

    Riot act: Alecky Blythe and Clare Perkins rehearse for Little Revolution. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
    Riot act: Alecky Blythe and Clare Perkins rehearse for Little Revolution. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

    Alecky Blythe’s play Little Revolution about the Hackney Riots ends its run at the Almeida early this month, though we might not have seen the last of it. It’s been suggested that the play should come to Hackney, a move that would at least mean more of the people the play is about will get to see it.

    And the play is certainly worth seeing, both for what it says and how it says it. Much has been made of Blythe’s verbatim method; the playwright ventured out during the riots three years ago, going as far as Wolverhampton, interviewing people and searching for material that could form the basis of a dramatic work.

    As it happens, Hackney resident Blythe found her focus for Little Revolution closer to home. She witnessed the looting of Siva Kandiah’s shop on Clarence Road, and returning the next day discovered that a group had been set up to help the riot-stricken shopkeeper.

    “When I went back I met Tony and Sarah, who told me they were setting up a campaign, and that they’d seen the show that I had on at the time, London Road. I could see I had access to a forward development, a narrative, and that there were people here getting together trying to do something about what had happened. So that’s why I focused in on Hackney.”

    What does the play bring to light about Hackney? As the play alternates between scenes of rioting, the work of campaign group Stop Criminalising Hackney Youth, and an incongruous- seeming plan to hold a community tea party, a more nuanced picture of Hackney begins to emerge.

    “I think the show brings to light the sort of simmering class tensions that are probably quite prevalent in more and more parts of London with increasing gentrification,” says Blythe.

    For Blythe the riots were a catalyst that opened her eyes up to class tension and division. “My play is trying to do something about it, whether it succeeds or fails. The community tea party tries to do something about it, Stop Criminalising Hackney Youth is trying to do something about it. It’s about people trying to connect and maybe misfiring.”

    The idea of recording real people then getting actors to speak their words surely makes Blythe’s relationship to her material more complex than the norm. What if one of the characters comes to see the play and takes offence, or claims they’re being misrepresented? “I’m always very, very nervous,” Blythe admits. But I try to explain to people that it’s not a biography of their lives, that I’m a dramatist. Yes it’s their real words but they were edited, and I tried to be up front as much as possible with those central characters.”

    When I caught a Saturday evening performance, the character of Councillor Ian Rathbone was a constant source of laughter, while newsagent Siva found himself patronised at every turn by his middle class benefactors. I ask Blythe whether she’s received much feedback from the people themselves.

    “Councillor Rathbone absolutely loved it and wants us to take it to Hackney,” she answers. “And Siva I think found it very moving. Being in it, I spotted him in the audience. Of course I started to think it must be so traumatic for him, and that maybe this was a bad idea. But he loved it and said he was moved to tears.”

    Little Revoultion is not Blythe’s first play about Hackney. Her play-writing debut was with Come Out Eli, about the Hackney Siege of 2002. At the time she was another struggling actor, and wrote the play essentially to get work.

    In each of her plays Blythe has used the verbatim method of play-writing she discovered at a workshop at the Actors’ Centre 12 years ago. Given that each character is real and the meticulous care taken with dialogue, it’s tempting to call Little Revolution a rewitnessing of the events of August 2011. Blythe points out, however, that while realistic, the play has been shaped through what she saw.

    “I’m telling it how it happened but through my eyes. One of the criticisms is there are not enough voices of the rioters or of the youth. The show illustrates how I tried, but those voices are really difficult to capture. People are responding to a white middle class woman – they would respond differently to a young black male. It’s a very personal thing, how I engage with people and how they engage with me, and whether they choose to or not.”

    ‘Community’ is at the centre of Little Revolution, attested by the Community Chorus, a crew of local volunteers that – it should be said – integrates seamlessly into the professional cast. These bystanders, rioters and residents are ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. One wonders how many of these indirect real life subjects of the play have seen or know about it.

    “Rupert [Goold, the Almeida’s new artistic director] was keen to reach out to a broader audience, and the theatre has been doing first time tickets for five pounds,” Blythe informs me.

    Blythe sees no problem with the propensity of “middle class voices” in the play; she says it is as much about these middle class voices “trying to reach out to the other side of the street”.

    “I don’t think theatre can change things greatly,” she adds. “But I do think it can get people talking about things. If people come out of the theatre talking about these issues then I think that’s great because it’s made them think about it in a different way.”

    Little Revolution is at the Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, N1 1TA until 4 October.

  • Winterville festival is coming to Victoria Park this Christmas

    Christmas jumpers at the ready for Winterville
    Christmas jumpers at the ready for Winterville

    Part of Victoria Park will this Christmas be transformed into a mini-town with its own ice rink, club nights and enough festive entertainment to make Scrooge himself feel merry.

    Winterville takes place from 2–31 December and aims to provide an array of traditional and alternative Christmas fare.

    An outdoor ice rink will be joined by a Ferris wheel, horse-drawn carriages, an indoor pub and street food vendors galore including pizzas from Voodoo Ray’s and Dorshi dumplings.

    There will also be an hour-long Christmas panto, club nights, comedy, cabaret and live gigs in a wood and mirror panelled Spiegeltent, as well as performances of Magnificent Bastard Productions’ Shit-Faced Shakespeare.

    Sundays will be an LGBT takeover day, and a crop of London’s best alternative nightlife and cabaret artists are on the bill, including Jonny Woo, John Sizzle, Ma Butcher’s cult bingo series and a Christmas Extravaganza by the legendary Sink The Pink.

    Food and drink are very much on Winterville’s agenda, with a world food street market planned and bespoke bars to serve warming hot cocktails. Meanwhile Winterville’s Produce market offers a chance to buy artisan produce directly from local farmers.

    Entry is free to the Winterville ‘town’ with tickets for a select number of attractions going on sale from 30 September (see the Winterville website to purchase tickets).

  • Paddy Casey at Red Gallery, 25 September 2014

    Paddy Casey

    Scouted at the tender age of 24 by Sony, a 3 day studio session led to a record deal and an album release of the session recordings called “Amen… So be it” which went double Platinum worldwide.

    After a spell learning his trade on the road with the likes of The Pretenders, Tracey Chapman, REM and Ian Brown, Paddy’s second album, ‘Living’ proved so popular (15 times platinum) that he felt compelled to tour it.

    After 5 years on the road, Paddy wanted to go back to his roots, his new album was mixed and recorded in his own house in Dublin.

    An intimate gig at Red Gallery is a chance to hear some old favourites and new forthcoming material.

    A percentage of the door takings will be given to the Children’s charity Little Hearts Matter, they offer support and information, and provide support and information to families who have been affected by a diagnosis of a single ventricle heart condition (half a working heart).

    Thursday 25 September 2014 – Doors open 7.30pm

    Tickets (on the door) £15 + Booking fee from Seetickets

    Red Gallery
    1-3 Rivington Street
    London
    EC2A 3DT

  • Little Revolution review – revisiting the Hackney riots

    Them and us: Rufus Wright and Bayo Gbadamosi in Little Revolution
    Them and us: Rufus Wright and Bayo Gbadamosi in Little Revolution

    While most of the country watched in disbelief at the riots on their television screens, Alecky Blythe headed out into Clapton armed with a Dictaphone, where she seized every chance to talk to those caught up in the events of August 2011.

    The result of her recordings is Little Revolution, a completely verbatim play in which actors repeat dialogue transmitted to them through discreet earpieces. Blythe plays herself, one of a dozen professional actors, and is joined by a band of local volunteers who are the rioters, the ‘disaffected youth’ and awe-struck bystanders.

    The audience surrounds the stage (there’s no neat division of ‘them and us’) and in riot scenes hoodied hordes scuttle in and out with stolen goods in blue carrier bags. Blythe intersperses rioting and vox-popped observations from the sidelines with her main narrative focus: the looting of a shop on Clarence Road which puts its owner, Siva, out of business.

    Clapton Square couple Sarah and Tony hatch a plan to put Siva back in business, and enlist the help of Father Rob Wickham and Councillor Ian Rathbone. But the attempt to heal an open wound using the sticking plaster of a community tea party (sponsored by M&S) only highlights division between “the two sides of the road”.

    Imogen Stubbs is liberal Sarah, one of a clutch of biggish names in the cast including Ronni Ancona as market trader Jane and Game of Thrones’ Lucian Msamati as Colin, the enigmatic barber who speaks of a “little revolution…[that] hasn’t stopped here yet.”

    While the Clapton Square group hogs the headlines (to the delight of Councillor Rathbone, played with a merciless sense of buffoonery by Barry McCarthy), another campaign Stop Criminalising Hackney Youth, started by residents of Pembury Estate, makes little to no headway. “Their babies are already going to turn out to be criminals,” dismisses one passerby.

    Blythe, all the while, hears and records all, the glue between disparate scenes, though she’s more our bumbling guide than intrepid explorer, prone to nervous laughter and tomfoolery.

    The Tricycle in Kilburn long ago offered its own verbatim take on the riots, but Little Revolution tries a different tack, focusing more on this fractured notion of ‘community’, a word tarnished by inequality. From a playwright who herself braved the riots, Little Revolution is a brave and important play.

    Little Revolution is at the Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, N1 1TA until 4 October.

  • The Nervemeter: London’s homeless distributed art magazine

    Ian Allison - Nervemeter 620
    Nervemeter editor Ian Allison

    We were somewhere outside Shoreditch Town Hall when Little Jay turned up with a stash of this quarter’s Nervemeter magazine. I’d read it already but bought a copy and gave it to my friend. We then sat down next to a portable pissoir in Hoxton Square to have a read.

    “This is a true story,” begins the preface. “It has been rewritten only so far as was necessary to conceal personalities. It is a terrible story, but it is also a story of hope and of beauty.”

    The text is actually from a book by nineteenth-century poet, painter, magician and occultist Aleister Crowley, who may or may not have signed his name with a cartoon cock ’n’ balls for an ‘A’ as he does on the first page of the Nervemeter.

    It’s a high-risk strategy for page three. You teeter along the razor-sharp crag that leads to proper page four engagement with the publication, fighting huge pressure to shriek “twats!” and tear the magazine to pieces, stuffing them into the nearest possible portable pissoir.

    Page four is interesting though, and not just for its facsimile of a temperance pledge. At the bottom of the page you can find out how to go into business alongside Little Jay:

    “If you are begging on the streets then you qualify to sell Nervemeter magazine,” it says. “The minimum suggested donation is £3: all of that money stays with the vendor.”

    Which is how it works. The two men chiefly responsible for the Nervemeter – Ian Allison, who looks after the words, and Kieron Livingstone, who does the pictures – carry boxes of it across London, dropping them at shelters or personally delivering them to homeless vendors with whom they’ve had relationships for years. The vendors go out and sell the magazines, and keep the proceeds.

    There are a few outposts in central and west London, with a heartland in the east.

    “We’ve got a guy outside Highbury tube, we’ve got a guy on Broadway Market, we’ve got Bob on Shoreditch High Street, Little Jay in Shoreditch. Over the whole time it’s probably about 50 or 60 people who’ve sold the magazine,” says Edinburgh-born Allison.

    The Nervemeter started as the information organ the London Poor, which was Allison and Livingstone’s plot to cause Starbucks to collapse, along the lines suggested by the anti-financier Max Kaiser.

    “He was into bringing down Coca Cola and Starbucks through short-selling, and boycotts,” says Allison, who works as a financial journalist in Canary Wharf.

    “He had this list of the most bloated companies, that if you could wobble with the share price you’d have activist hedgefunds just slamming into them.”

    The idea of the London Poor was to start the boycott and publish news of the tumbling share price.

    “It was a financial paper,” is Livingstone’s description of the 2004 project. “The London Poor Starbucks Share Price Experiment – catchy.”

    The homeless distributors were part of the plan from the start, says Allison. “It was always going to be distributed by poor people, or sold by poor people.

    “We were sort of sickened by the number of free magazines everywhere, the Metro and everything, and we thought it would be good to have something that’s got value, that’s sold by poor people.

    “We liked the irony of having a poor person selling you financial advice as well.”

    “It was a conceptual art piece originally,” adds Livingstone. “The poor, the London Poor, the Victoriana, Starbucks, and the poor selling the rich financial advice – this was all in our heads.

    “We put all of this stuff into the first issue and it’s sort of developed from there into what it is now.”

    Allison thinks the Nervemeter’s become “a lot more shoddy” since then. Its production values have been enhanced, but its close concentration on a particular theme has bolted into a more freely flowing montage of text and images.

    Previous issues have covered the Olympics, financial markets and benefits cuts. The current issue explores thinking around addiction, including quotations from psychiatric journals, addicts, advocates and temperance men – all culled by Allison from the British Library.

    Other highlights include the prize-draw word-search at the back – “Hurry! Closes midnight tomorrow!” – and an image of David Cameron’s face spliced with the arms of a man injecting heroin.

    It can get caustic. “The first one we did included alternative ways of making money if your benefits get stopped or something,” says Allison. “We predicted the riots in that one! It was the start of 2011 and we said in the editorial ‘you know, if your benefits have been stopped, we wouldn’t normally blame people for just rioting,’ but we wanted to advocate an alternative approach and say have you thought about, like, heroin dealing, or prostitution, or dog-farming, or money laundering on a really small scale?”

    According to Livingstone, at the time they saw this less as satire and more like a kind of documentary. “It was more like, these are jobs you can get if your benefits have been stopped, this is what you’ll be left with.”

    Livingstone was homeless himself for part of the 1990s, and now makes a living as an artist and designer. Neither he nor Allison think the magazine is necessarily about people finding routes out of homelessness.

    “We’re not social services,” says Allison. “We’d like to encourage anyone who’s interested in getting more involved with our project to do so. And anyone who’s got a problem with drink or drugs, we would encourage them to go and get help.

    “There are guys you know who you meet in a doorway, and I’ve had them round my flat for a bath or whatever, but there’s only so much you can do.”

    Livingstone says selling the magazine gives the vendors a measure of dignity and freedom.

    “You are giving people the freedom to earn a bit of money, and it’s not patronising. Anyone who’s selling it usually has an understanding of it; the ones who keep coming back love it, and they’re the best sellers because they understand it.”

    The Nervemeter comes out whenever Allison and Livingstone can afford to print it. The latest print-run was 7,500 copies, printed with proceeds from a benefit gig featuring Fat White Family, the Stallions and the Phobophobes with accompanying art show in May at the Red Gallery in Rivington Street.

    Their next plan is to buy their own printing press, and another fundraiser is in the works.

    Interested artists can find out more at www.nervemeter.co.uk.

  • KimNara Music: the youth charity that improves lives through music-making

    KimNara music 620
    Showmen: BAM! perform at The Hud

    “I had to stand in front of 100 bankers and speak for six minutes about why they should give us money. It’s so not my bag though, I mean. I was so uncomfortable.”

    For his six-minute live pitch, Steve Fisher won funding from Hackney Giving Live this summer to fund another term of KimNara Music, a music programme for teenagers with learning disabilities, autism and complex emotional needs.

    But Fisher and his wife Tina Pinder, who founded the charity, are no strangers to discomfort. KimNara itself started with an unfortunate accident.

    “We were both professional musicians, and then she (Pinder) got run over by a motor bike.” The accident destroyed the nerves that lift her right hand. Pinder, who trained as a classical pianist from the age of five, was told she’d never play again.

    But one enterprising doctor at Homerton Hospital, in his spare time, built Tina a mechanical contraption using Meccano parts and elastic bands to spring her fingers back up when she pressed them down, allowing her to play music once again. In the process, her priorities had shifted a bit:

    “After that, rather than being an egotistic musician — because all musicians are — she came out of that wanting to give everything back.” That was 2006.

    Eight years later, Pinder and Fisher, who left a fifteen-year career as an “acoustician to the stars” to join the project, are still throwing everything into the programme. Pinder has taken on a master’s degree in music therapy, and lectures on the subject at universities around the country.

    When they join the programme the young musicians generally have “no social skills to speak of”, says Fisher. The aim is to inspire self-confidence through creativity and teamwork, using original songwriting, performance, and an extensive kit including electric guitars, fuzz boxes, drum kits and violins.

    On evenings during the school term, the musicians work from the Huddleston Centre youth club in in Clapton, writing, composing and performing original tunes like ‘Internet Killed the Video Star’, the enigmatic ‘I’ve Got a Saucepan, I Want to Cook for You,’ and a song about the Scottish referendum, ‘Let’s Be United’. “We have one student in particular who’s very adamant about that,” says Fisher.

    Recordings of the group’s songs on Soundcloud display no shortage of confidence. “I can rock the world, yeah yeah” is the hook on the energetic ‘I Can Feel the Music’; “It’s so hot you’ll probably melt” another track warns, of itself.

    KimNara takes on 7-9 young people per term, supervised by three musicians and a youth worker. The young musicians are well-behaved, but excitable, explains Fisher: “It’s like when a footballer scores a goal and rips his shirt off. They’ll get that from just hearing the right chord.”

    Most of the musicians have been with the programme for several years, providing an alternative to conventional therapies that “haven’t really got them anywhere”, says Fisher.

    If funding allows, the musicians put on an end-of-term show, which starts with raucous live performances and ends in a Q&A and jam session with the audience. Put simply, Fisher says: “Everyone that comes thinks it’s the best thing they’ve ever seen.”

    According to Fisher, the unique benefits of making music has to do with connecting both sides of the brain.

    “There’s one lad, probably the shyest one we’ve ever had. He stutters. And he just didn’t want to know… It got to be two weeks before the show and he came in and said, I’ve written a song. So we bashed the song together and did it for the show. And a week before the show he said, again stuttering, I’m gonna be the MC! We said, okay, you want to be the MC, you’re the MC. We got to the show, he got the microphone — didn’t stutter once.”

    Finding money, finding venues and finding time are constant struggles for KimNara music, but in the rehearsal room they keep things simple with two rules for the workshops: don’t hurt anyone, and try to keep your clothes on.

    www.kimnaramusic.org.uk

  • Meet Hackney’s all-female Deep Throat Choir

    Deep Throat Choir 620
    Deep Throat Choir

    Deep Throat Choir are an all-female singing sensation from Hackney, and they’re on a mission. After a lauded performance at Green Man Festival last month, we talk to founder Luisa Gerstein about roots, visions and who they really are.

    Deep Throat Choir – what a provocative name. What is behind it?
    It is a provocative name but you forget that quickly. People barely batted an eyelid when we let it into the ether, and as far as where it came from it’s just a joke that stuck. It’s silly and not meant to be taken seriously, and for the most part people get that.

    How would you describe your sound?
    It’s so straightforward: voices and drums, just voices and drums. When arranging the songs I’ve liked being restricted in that way, and I think it’s good to have limitations in the tools you’re using. Voices are so powerful, so it’s nice to leave them alone for once. So far all the songs are covers, ranging from old soul to more recent indie songs. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time so I’ve got a backlog of ideas I want to try, and also to write specifically for the choir.

    What’s your vision as a choir?
    To raise our voices together on a weekly basis till we’re old cronies. I can’t tell you how good that feels!

    What does East London mean to you?
    It’s where we come together and sing, and it’s where a lot of us live, but I’d feel disingenuous to claim roots here – I started the choir by reaching out to female friends who like singing and they’re from all over the place. We get together in a beautiful church with incredible acoustics and it’s great to be part of a community – we’re one of four choirs who rehearse there and there’s always some kind of activity going on. I don’t think it would have been as easy to get it started anywhere else in London, and most of our performances are happily within a short radius of where we sing, so there is that sense of rootedness.

    Where are you going next?
    We’ve got a few more plans to perform this year, including a Christmas show at St Barnabas Church just off Shacklewell Lane. We’re going to start recording so we’ll be able to put some music out soon too. We’d also really love to do a castle tour around the UK next summer and a barge tour, so if anyone can help with those things then please get in touch!

    www.facebook.com/Deepthroatchoir